Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
was at the start of the process to what he has now become is a result of me putting a lot of myself into him, along with little pieces of so many guys I knew growing up in New York,” says Scalici.“Te Godfather is one of my favor- ite movies, but for this game, we wanted our characters to be real wise guys, not an idealized vision of what you see in that film. Plus, we certainly didn’t want them to be the stereo- types you see in so many movies.” Te team at 2K Czech used its proprietary Naughty Dog’s game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves brings the cinematic characters to interactive life. To do this successfully, the team made sure the characters delivered a compelling performance. that the more evenly distributed polygons give good auto-LOD results. Te other is that this, in combination with the polygon densities, al- lows the team to effectively use its in-game face meshes as its sculpting bases. As a result, the team can spend more time sculpting, thereby significantly easing various processes, such as the creation of wrinkle maps. For Naughty Dog’s cinematic skin, the crew uses texture-space diffusion. Te artists bake the lighting information into a separate map, which is blurred with different widths for the red, green, and blue channels. Te blur kernel combines the five blurs into a single 12-tap blur. For hair, the studio uses the Kajiya-Kay hair-shading model, giving the hair its aniso- tropic look. Te group then tweaks the shadow so that the hair does not self-shadow, but in- stead uses a diffuse falloff that wraps around the hair strands. Te direction of the sun used for the specular is always set at a grazing angle. According to Hagedorn, part of the game’s story is told with the look of the characters. Not only do they change outfits on a regular basis, but these characters sometimes become physically affected by what is happening to them as the narrative plays out. For some characters, Naughty Dog has as many as four different beat-up face textures. For each outfit, there is at least one dirty or beat-up variation. In addition, the characters can get dynamically wet or dynamically accumulate snow, also af- fecting their appearance in the title. Mafia II 2K Games/2K Czech Mafia II introduces a new cast of characters and an open world environment for players to explore through a 10-year journey that spans from the 1940s through 1950s in Mafia II. 22 August/September 2010 Te game introduces a colorful cast of young characters that enter the violent business of organized crime. According to Jack Scalici, director of creative production at 2K Games, who served as lead writer, music supervisor, casting director, and voice director for the title, one of the goals of the team was to bring these authentic-looking characters to life and build an emotional bond between the main charac- ters and the nonplayer characters that populate the New York-inspired city of Empire Bay. “We examined each character’s reason for existing in the game, their relationships with one another, and we made some adjustments to ensure they all feel real and have a defined purpose,” explains Scalici. “From there, I start- ed working with the cast. Te best thing you can do for your character is to cast a good actor and let him or her become that character. I end- ed up using the first draft of the script I was given as more of a blueprint than a script when it came to the characters and dialog. After the dialog was written, we still didn’t consider it 100 percent final. Te guys at 2K Czech have some incredible tools, and they can respond to changes very fast, so I had the freedom to improvise during recording and to completely change certain scenes if they weren’t working out in terms of how they were intended.” Joe Barbaro, who is protagonist Vito Scaletta’s best friend and wingman for most of Mafia II, was brought to life by actor Bobby Costanzo. Scalici describes Barbaro as the life of the party but someone who is going to end up in a fight by the end of the night. Although it might seem like there were Hollywood in- spirations for Mafia II, Scalici maintains that he did not watch any movies or TV shows to help craft these virtual characters. “Te development of Joe from what he Illusion Engine to bring these characters to life, while utilizing third-party middleware, such as Autodesk’s Kynapse for AI, PhysX for Physics simulation, and FaceFX for in-game facials. According to Denby Grace, senior pro- ducer on the title at 2K Games, this engine allowed the team to fully realize the vision for the game; as a result, the artists were able to provide a hugely detailed and destructible world that will load without the player incur- ring any wait time after entering the city. “Te main difference between Mafia I and Mafia II in terms of technology has been the dramatic increase of texture resolution and poly count (from hundreds to thousands),” explains Ivan Rylka, lead character artist on Mafia II at 2K Czech. “Civilian characters have 4000 triangles on average, while major characters exceed 6500 triangles; Vito, the protagonist, has nearly 10,000 triangles.” Tis higher visual credibility was achieved through complicated shaders, as well as using normal maps for wrinkles and expressions, and facial animation through FaceFX technology. Rylka says that physically simulated cloth on a wide range of Vito’s outfits was also something the team couldn’t have done in Mafia I. “During the process of character produc- tion, we also used ZBrush for high-res models, which gave us incredible detail to bake into the normal maps of our in-game models cre- ated in 3ds Max,” details Rylka. Grace believes that this sequel ultimately benefited from a larger development budget, thanks to the success of the original title. Tat allowed the team to provide more depth for not only how these characters look, but how they behave in the game. “Everyone who has played the game has said the same thing to me: Our characters feel like real wise guys, and the story has a mob feel and atmosphere that’s there in a big way,” relays Scalici. “What many of them don’t realize is that this is achieved without the characters ever using the words ‘respect’ and ‘honor,’ and when you hear the word ‘family’ in Mafia II, 99 per- cent of the time it’s the main character talking about his mother and sister. Like the first Mafia